Is Ultrasound The New Laser Treatment?

It’s still something that most women aren’t too comfortable talking about, but unwanted body hair is often a daily struggle. It can lower our confidence, cost us money and waste a lot of time if we have to keep treating it. Of course, there is a lot of pressure on women in our society to act like undesirable hair simply doesn’t exist, so talking about how to deal with it usually isn’t considered acceptable.

As a result, it’s understandable that laser hair removal treatments have become extremely popular over the last few years. Technological advancements have presented us with a new range of choices for getting rid of those hairs we don’t want anyone to know about. Fortunately, there is now a great balance being struck between effectiveness and affordability in the commercial market, so great laser solutions are no longer prohibitively expensive.

However, we are now seeing the emergence of a new innovation which could actually replace laser technology in the near future. Ultrasound waves are now being used via small tweezer-like tools to destroy individual hair follicles, which is a similar concept to that used by lasers but with more precision. A major benefit of this option is that it can treat hairs of almost any colour, while laser treatments are only effectively on particular skin and hair types.

So should people with light hair or dark skin be getting excited about the prospect of heading to their local ultrasound hair removal clinic in the near future? Well, we aren’t sure if this is commercially viable for the mass market at this stage. Not many places are offering the service because of a few key drawbacks.

For one thing, the hairs must be treated individually, one at a time. They are held in the tweezer arms of the ultrasound device before the follicle is treated. This makes the process slow, and it means repeat sessions are required to prevent regrowth. On the other hand, the advantage of this is that the skin around each hair isn’t directly affected, and as a result there is no pain.

Perhaps in the near future we will see a more viable version of this method which works faster, although for now we expect that the go-to treatment for most women will still be laser-based technology.